Libertarian Party of California Membership History: Difference between revisions

Records of "dues-paying membership" and the related category of "central committee membership" have not been maintained and reported consistently through the LPC's history.  For some periods, only fragmentary information is currently available, though it is possible that further research will turn up more information.

Since the unification of the Libertarian Party of California and the [[California Libertarian Council]] in the early 1980s, the term "central committee member" has been used to refer to people who either (1) pay dues, sign the certification regarding initiation of force, and are not registered with another party ''or'' (2) qualify for this category through election under the state election law.  This is not ''exactly'' the same thing as the term '"dues-paying member" would suggest, since people who qualify by election wouldn't necessarily also pay dues.  However the number of people who qualified only in this way was always a very small fraction of the total. A further complication is that for most of the LPC's history it was not practical to track the actual voter registration status of people who paid dues, so the reported counts of central committee members might well have included some people who were not strictly qualified (because they were registered with another party, but the person maintaining the LPC's database did not know that).  But the number of such cases has also always been a very small fraction of the total.  So as a practical matter, the counts of "central committee members" and (state-level) "dues-paying members" have tracked each other closely enough that they can be considered the same for the purpose of comparison with other kinds of counts, or with each other over time.